


Choices

by DeCarabas



Series: Fugitives Together [24]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Act 2, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 07:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4295109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apostates and blood magic go hand-in-hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choices

"Do you realize how lucky you are?" Anders—or Justice, whichever name he was going by at the moment—asked in two voices.

They were standing in an isolated cabin a few hours outside of Kirkwall with scorch marks where the rage demons had crawled through the floorboards, the body of a blood mage at their feet, younger than Bethany had been when she’d died. Ser Thrask had asked Hawke to quietly look into a rumor that he’d hesitated to involve the other templars in, and this wasn’t the result any of them had been hoping for. _Lucky_ was not the first word that came to Hawke’s mind. "I could use some context here, love."

Anders had a habit of speaking up as if they were already in the middle of a conversation after he’d been stewing over something in his head for a while, not always bothering to fill in enough details so other people could follow along. Hawke sometimes wondered if that was a Fade spirit thing, but maybe it was just Anders.

It could be difficult to tell exactly what Anders was focusing on with Justice’s blue light filling his eyes, but he was looking around the little room, not at Hawke or the corpse or the remnants of the mage’s parents who’d tried to hide her, both of them dead long before Hawke and Anders had arrived. If Hawke looked past all that, he still couldn’t tell what Anders was seeing—the cabin itself looked ordinary to him, just a home like any other. No sinister manuals on Tevinter blood rites or journals filled with disturbing entries to suggest what had happened here; nothing to even suggest that a mage had lived here at all, not so much as a staff leaning against the wall.

"Your father," Anders explained, Justice’s voice an echo. "Do you know how rare it is for an apostate to have anyone to learn from?"

True enough, he supposed, but Anders must have more than that on his mind if he was still glowing. "I was better off than most, yeah."

"Better off than her," Justice said, looking towards the body. "This family could keep her safe from the templars, but they were no mages, they didn’t know how to teach her. The only ones who offered her that were demons."

Ah. He nodded, leaning on his staff. "You’re right. I was very lucky." An apostate had to learn if they wanted to survive, and if he hadn’t had his father around—well, he could see how lessons from a demon would start to seem appealing when the only other option was submitting to the templars.

There was a reason _apostate_ and _blood magic_ went hand-in-hand in so many people’s minds.

Hawke had seen a few books on magic floating around the underground when he was working for Athenril, but they were rare and expensive, and the subject matter tended to run to the extreme—forbidden texts, _How to Use Friends and Influence Enemies_ and the like. Never anything truly practical, no beginner’s guides to healing or tips on how to avoid getting mobbed by demons.

And he’d heard stories of rich families bribing tutors for mage children—a child kept locked up and hidden away, the secret family shame, so the stories usually went. Though that sounded like something from one of Varric’s books.

But for those without that kind of money, the only teachers they were likely to find were the ones whispering promises in the Fade.

"It shouldn’t be a matter of luck," Anders said. "It’s the Chantry that forces us to choose—if you want to learn control, you have to submit to theirs first. All the resources you could ask for, at the cost of life imprisonment."

Hawke shrugged uncomfortably. Anders sounded so bitter, but there had been plenty of times growing up when Hawke had wondered what it would be like to do just that—to go to one of those Circles, to see just what it was they had to teach. Meanwhile Anders had been risking everything to escape for just a short time, to glimpse some of the freedom Hawke had.

His father had taught him and Bethany, yes, but only what he thought they needed to know, and that was mostly about avoiding attention. Hawke couldn’t cast much more than a fireball until after he joined up with Athenril, where for the first time he’d been surrounded by people outside his family who knew he was a mage and valued him for it, where he had to put his skills to work on a regular basis, develop them instead of hide them. And even then, he’d just been building on the basics that his father had taught him—there were whole branches of magic that he still knew nothing about.

And now more than ever, even with all he’d seen at the Gallows, even with everything he’d heard from Anders, as hard as he was working to avoid ever actually being caught by the templars—still, he’d kill to know what a Circle library might have to say about Fade spirits, about possession, about abomination and how exactly it was defined. There had to be more than what his father had taught him. He’d heard tall tales about Rivaini hedge witches who actually volunteered to become possessed; the stories all made it sound like scams and superstition at best, if not outright demon-worship, but since meeting Anders, he’d started to wonder. He’d asked Isabela about it, but beyond confirming that there was a grain of truth to the stories, she’d been light on the details—she claimed not to have much time for religion of any stripe.

It was driving him nuts not to be able to get into the Circle, not without risking his freedom—the one place where he might actually learn something about Anders’ situation.

Hawke’s whole life had been about managing the risk of becoming an abomination on one hand and the risk of templar-enforced Tranquility on the other; and from the night he’d first met Anders, he’d started to doubt everything he’d thought he’d known about both. Anders had been possessed and yet remained himself—changed from the person he’d been before, the way he described it, but still a _person_ , not some slavering monstrosity. And for just a brief moment, Anders had reached out to someone made Tranquil and made him whole again—it hadn’t lasted, but the fact that it had happened at all should have been impossible. Everything about Anders should have been impossible. These two great insurmountable horrors that every mage feared, Tranquility and abomination—from the moment Hawke had met Anders, suddenly there was hope that those horrors weren’t so insurmountable.

And Anders kept talking about himself like he was disaster, like he’d ruined his life for anything except serving the cause of mage freedom, completely unable to see how much hope he offered the mages just by existing, by making his situation with Justice work.

Hawke knew there was a good chance that even the Circle wouldn’t have anything helpful to offer on the subject. The way Anders described it, the Chantry controlled what the mages could and could not research, just like it controlled everything else about their lives. Objective studies of Rivaini seers or anyone else voluntarily choosing to invite spirits into their bodies, anything that suggested possession didn’t have to end in complete disaster—that wasn’t exactly on the approved reading list.

But even so, when it came to learning about Fade spirits, the Circle was the only game in town. That or going to the source, he supposed—which hadn’t worked out so well for the blood mage lying at his feet.

Anders was still glowing, and it occurred to Hawke that Anders’ parents hadn’t been mages either. If things had gone differently, it could very easily have been Anders hiding out in some cabin in the middle of nowhere, with a family that didn’t know how to help him.

"She deserves justice," Anders said, looking at the body. But given that they were the ones who'd killed her, and the demons who'd influenced her were already dead, Hawke wasn't sure what Anders thought they could do about that.

"You know we didn't have a choice."

"We did. So did she. We always have a choice, but they're all the wrong choices. Fear of the Circles drives us to demons, fear of demons drives us into the Circles—we just choose which fear we can live with. Either way, the Chantry still uses you. You're on their leash, or else you're the bad example they'll use to bring the rest in line. Plenty of choices, they just all end the same way."

"You're changing things, love. I've seen it. What you've done with the mage underground-"

"Isn't enough," Anders cut him off. "It wasn't enough for her. We can't reach everybody. We can't even offer the runaways much beyond a fighting chance. All we're doing is choosing how we want to sacrifice ourselves."

With those words, Justice's glow faded abruptly, and Anders fell silent.

Hawke wasn't sure he liked the way Justice had vanished. "Hey. I'm not planning on sacrificing myself for anything anytime soon." He bumped his shoulder lightly against Anders' until he looked away from the body and met Hawke's gaze. "You better stick around too."

That didn't get him the smile he was hoping for. Anders just shook his head, looking again around the isolated cabin. "I'm trying."


End file.
